Twitter’s announcement this week that it was going to enable country-specific censorship of posts is arousing fury around the Internet. Commentators, activists, protesters and netizens have said it’s “very bad news” and claim to be “#outraged”. Bianca Jagger, for one, asked how to go about boycotting Twitter, on Twitter, according to the New York Times. (Step one might be… well, never mind.) The critics have settled on #TwitterBlackout: all day on Saturday the 28th, they promised to not tweet, … show all text

The debate about what should — and shouldn’t — show in a Google search result for “santorum” has been well-documented, at this point. But I’d like to use this now famous search to illustrate something else: how it appears Google is taking its eye off the ball of… Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

You can run, but you can’t hide. Facebook’s biggest user interface overhaul since the Wall, the Facebook Timeline, is now becoming mandatory for all users. According to the company, over the next few weeks, everyone will get the new Timeline. And here’s the important part: when you do, you’ll have just seven days to preview what’s there now, and hide anything you don’t want others to see.

Editor’s note: Mark Hendrickson is the founder and CEO of Plancast, a social site for planning events, which he has decided to stop working on full-time. In this guest post, Hendrickson takes us through a detailed analysis of why it never took off and what he learned. He is also a former TechCrunch writer.
Nearly three years ago, I left my position at TechCrunch to start my own Internet business, with the idea of creating a web application that’d help people get together in real-life rather than show all text

Reinforcing the fact that Chris Dodd really does not get what's happening, and showing just how disgustingly corrupt the MPAA relationship is with politicians, Chris Dodd went on Fox News to explicitly threaten politicians who accept MPAA…

You’ve probably noticed we’ve been quiet lately. Well, we’re extremely excited to announce that Summify has been acquired by Twitter! I know, right? We can hardly believe it ourselves!
Roughly 2 years ago, we moved from Romania to Vancouver after being accepted into Bootup Labs, an awesome startup incubator. It has been an incredible journey, with lots of highs, a few lows, and many product iterations. In March 2011 we launched our email summary product and we’ve been blown away by the response… show all text

Many of you have asked, so here’s what’s going on with me.
WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE
8/1979: Born. Grew up in CT, built a killer eraser collection, fell in love with computers.
Left college to start a company. Fell hard. Fled to India for 3 months.
Started 2nd company. Learned to be an adult. Fell in love with NYC.
Moved to SF, discovered burritos & some of my fave people on Earth.
9/2011: Got diagnosed with Leukemia!
Cried. Went through 3 cycles of chemo. Hurt. Thought hard about what I want out of… show all text

Updated: Commenters have pointed out that I've jumped the gun here. SOPA is shelved, but not killed. It could be put back into play at any time.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has killed SOPA, stopping all action on it. He didn't say why he killed it, but the overwhelming, widespread unpopularity of the bill and the threat of a presidential veto probably had something to do with it.
Before you get too excited, remember that the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), the extremely similar Senate version of S… show all text

I’m very proud of the business that we’ve created here at Mocality, but I’m especially proud of two things:
Our crowdsourcing program. When we started this business, we knew that (unlike in the UK or US, where you can just kickstart your directory business with a DVD of business data bought from a commercial supplier), if we wanted a comprehensive database of Kenyan business, we would have to build it ourselves. We knew also that if we wanted to build the business quickly, we’d have to engage a… show all text

Google’s search results are undergoing their most radical transformation ever, as a new “Search Plus Your World” format begins rolling out today. It finds both content that’s been shared with you privately along with matches from the public web, all mixed into a single set… Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Social media optimized and meme focused aggregator BuzzFeed has just raised a $15.5 million round of Series C financing, lead by New Enterprise Associates and followed on by Lerer Ventures, Hearst Media, Softbank and RRE Ventures. In addition to the funding, NEA General Partner Patrick Kerins will be taking a position on the BuzzFeed board and Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer will be moving on up to BuzzFeed Executive Chairman.

‘Nothing has changed in regard to how we work with carriers to deliver Windows Phone updates to our customers,’ maintained a Microsoft official following a change in Microsoft’s update disclosure policy.

Pinterest is one of the hottest startups around these days and represents the latest buzzword in the Valley: curation. Here are some of my thoughts on why Pinterest and other such companies are getting attention and gaining traction with younger Internet users.

Want to instantly save all your Instagram photos to Dropbox when you take them? What about automatically updating your Twitter profile when you update your Facebook profile? Or, what about sharing any article you read in Read It Later to Twitter and Facebook, staggered by time via Buffer? A small bootstrapped startup called If This Then That has abstracted a simple set of tools to help you do each of these things, and many more.
And now it’s raised a big seed round of more than $1.5 million from show all text

A year ago Steven Levy suggested that Facebook should give us each a single “friend-list do-over.”
A lot of commenters challenged him. “Grow some balls and just unfriend people,” said one of the more even tempered readers. Another – “These comments are too constructive. Someone should just call this guy an idiot.”
Steven probably didn’t see that criticism coming, because he probably assumed people understand how difficult it is to unfriend people on Facebook at any sort of scale. You have to fi… show all text

Google, the company that has been fighting against paid links and “thin” content, seems to be behind a campaign that’s generating both on behalf of its Chrome browser. File this under “what were they thinking.” “This Post Sponsored By Google” Aaron Wall… Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.